You can locate yourself in recent Scotland, if you like, by a simple expedient.

All that you might ever know, or wish to know, about education, economics, class, familial relations, the welfare state and social formation lies within your response to a single phrase.

Can you, will you – or won’t you – take a telling?

As a quick test, it works like a charm. Some of us were always getting a telling. Whether we ever gained the ability to take the thing tellt was, of course, another matter.

But granny’s granny, myth’s matriarch, wasn’t far wrong. There’s a fascist on the BBC? Take a telling.

There’s an ermined fool who says that bankers’ bonuses are a price worth paying? Tellt. And postal workers are the latest to be left hanging on the wire by – my Neil Kinnock voice – a Labour Party? Twice tellt.

Part of the current discourse in Londonshire says that fascism reappears in our public life for one of several reasons. First, they say, because new Labour has deserted and/or alienated “the white working class”.

Secondly, say the political elite, it’s because the apathetic hoi polloi are fed up with political elites.

Thirdly – and we had better capitalise here – there is the Failure of the Left.

Pick through those giblets. One thing is lurid and obvious. Capitalism, theory and praxis, just failed in a manner that would have had Gramsci dancing.

Whatever the Italian is for “told you so” would apply. The mass of humanity just awoke to the certain knowledge that it had been robbed blind, systematically, as a direct consequence of the prevailing ideology for which – the truly funny part – it voted happily.

That being so, anyone espousing any version of socialism should be, you might have thought, quids in. Those quids would be borrowed from Mao’s murderous heirs, of course, but never mind: where is the articulation of a decent human response to organised theft and global crisis?

Its absence from what the BBC cares to define as “debate” is one thing. The failure of the left to recover philosophically from Popper, Hayek and that lot – the syllogism as a shell game – is another. But we sit amid spectacular debris. This ought to be the left’s moment. This is that crisis of capitalism. All the predictions, down through the tradition, were – a joke is still a joke – on the money. And still we cannot take a telling?

Opportunism explains a lot. It was never too hard to turn a daughter of toil into a Westminster expenses fraud. The horny-handed sons and lovers were more malleable still. I could – but the lawyers would fidget – put faces to names and claims. Let’s only say that some noble careers have been constructed from incendiary speeches on the ever-gradual British road to socialism.

Chancers, in brief. Time after time, generation after generation, they got away with it: weigh the votes, calculate the allowances. No-one ever expected better of those working-class heroes. “Not Tory” did the job, and no-one ever stopped to notice why middle-class luxuries – ideas, we called them – were not afforded to proles. The left lived on the past, and in the past, like a stranded frost-bitten explorer dining on the hides of fallen companions.

It fought old battles tirelessly. If the same energy had just once been applied to an obvious threat – let’s call it Thatcher – as was expended on Trot-killing, or the winning of the convenorship of the Who Cares? sub-committee, ordinary embattled folk might now have a reason for hope. But they don’t.

As the Oxbridge drolls once observed in their Life Of Brian, the meek have a hell of a time.

So let us indict them, too. Should we mention poor ordinary folk betrayed by a self-indulgent redundant left? Absolutely.

But no-one said that you have to vote BNP. No-one suggested, either, that the absence of “a viable left-wing alternative” justified that old, working-class Tory, curtain-twitching racism. By idealising the tenements and schemes, by allowing cover to self-indulgence, by refusing to make people think, socialists wrote the Daily Mail’s happy headlines.

Take a telling: that old working class is no better than I am. And nostalgia is a disease.

I never joined anything, as it turned out. Between the decent drinkers of the old CP, the weird, sly, urbane types at the University of Edinburgh offering “a career”, the Marxist “groups”, sundry Nationalists, and unspeakable new Labour types urging me – I trust my paraphrase – to Stop Thatcherism by Enabling Tony, I could never summon the naivety. I was almost a signed-up Communist when I was 14: “almost” will do. Consult the file.

I am a Connollyite Marxist: classify that. Why has the left ceased to function in this country, at this of all times? Because historical memory has been suppressed. That much is true. But to talk of voting systems, or media ownership, or class inclinations, or a debased sense of solidarity, is to hide behind excuses.

Try this question. Why is the left, however defined, always a thing of the past, not the future? Why must we always summons ghosts today when we fail to talk properly about tomorrow?

I see ghosts in my mirror.

I see the ghosts of people he never knew in the face of my son. We said that history was important, that it was everything, and now we labour beneath that burden, with the last breath crushed, romantically, from our lungs.

Or not. Perhaps we should cheek the teachers. It’s what happens when you can never take a telling. The old language needs to go, for starters. Fussing over whether some grotty, spotty, anti-globalisation child is “properly left” gets us nowhere. And the past, that glorious recovered memory, remains the real and vital weapon of choice.

Karl Marx was right: there’s a start. Do I get to go on Question Time, or a Royal Mail picket line, or an RBS shareholders’ meeting, to say so? Do I get to flourish my top-end bourgeois education merely in order to demonstrate the currently self-evident? There is, in the old jargon, an applicable analysis more pertinent now than ever. We were robbed. People merely need to take a telling. So we begin.

Bear in mind that some people at Westminster, or within the BBC, or spending your council tax, are not keen on this sort of chatter. The smooth surface of democracy is disturbed, always, by “the People”. And the people only have themselves to blame.

So speak. There’s a fascist on the BBC? There is an “inevitable” Tory government? There is someone reminding you that you – yes, you; up at the back – could never take a telling? Speak. Like it or not, a loss of belief in your understanding of reality led directly to those lousy wars, that politics, and the fat little fascist enjoying his moment.

The failure of the left is the failure of breath, merely. We – and you can dispute the word if you like – became apologetic because we lost sight of honesty, decency, truth, and the old truth of ancient struggle. They – and there’s another preposition to dispute – just laughed all the way to the bank. Your bank, as it turned out.

Personally, I tell my ghosts to sit down and shut up. If they won’t take a telling, they can haunt elsewhere. History repeats, for that’s its point, and the repetitions are the relentless music of defeat. But the sound grows tiresome, after a while.

Facts say that our egalitarian noise was precisely right where bankers, florid Nazis and Westminster thieves were concerned. Socialism, it turns out, is the modern thing on the block. You merely have to say so to make it fashionable. If you doubt me, just observe the blind panic on the American right because a man who is not white occupies the White House. You think our homely BNP is wholly unrelated?

Tiresome and antique as the language might sound, this is, as ever, a struggle. And the past will not aid, or pardon.

Abolish all the parties who tell you, smiling, that what you get from politics is what you want. Your ghosts will nod at that. Your ghosts are not your children, though. They take a telling, those unborn people.